Consumer Mobility, Offline and Online Regional Trade: Evidence from High-Frequency Transaction Data

54 Pages Posted: 20 Aug 2020 Last revised: 6 May 2024

See all articles by David Bounie

David Bounie

Télécom Paris

Youssouf Camara

Télécom Paris; Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau

John W. Galbraith

McGill University - Department of Economics; Center for Interuniversity Research and Analysis on Organization (CIRANO)

Date Written: June 11, 2020

Abstract

The evolution of consumer expenditure toward online purchasing may have substantial implications for trade patterns, and several studies have found a lower effect of distance in online purchases. The present study analyzes these effects in a broader set of consumer-merchant transactions than previous data have permitted, and at a fine scale, using inter-regional gravity models estimated on billions of card transactions. We use geo-located card transactions to build consumer mobility and inter-regional trade measures, allowing comparison of online and offline inter-regional purchases on a common sample of merchants which each conduct both offline and online card transactions, selected for unambiguous identification of region. Using data from France in the last pre-pandemic year, 2019, we find the effect of distance to be on average 46% smaller online than offline
and more heavily concentrated in the already-larger regional economies. With data dis-aggregated by product category, we find that the distance-effect reduction is most pronounced for durable goods and is also substantial for non-durable goods, with reductions in the effect of distance of around 70% and 45% on average respectively, compared with offline transactions. By contrast we find a negligible impact on services that are consumed in the same location regardless of purchasing channel. We show that these results are robust to various sample and model variations.

Keywords: consumption expenditure, consumer mobility, gravity model, inter-regional trade, e-commerce

Suggested Citation

Bounie, David and Camara, Youssouf and Galbraith, John W., Consumer Mobility, Offline and Online Regional Trade: Evidence from High-Frequency Transaction Data (June 11, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3624723 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3624723

David Bounie (Contact Author)

Télécom Paris ( email )

19 Place Marguerite Perey
Palaiseau, 91120
France

Youssouf Camara

Télécom Paris ( email )

19 Place Marguerite Perey
Palaiseau, 91120
France

Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau ( email )

Route de Saclay
Palaiseau, 91128
France

John W. Galbraith

McGill University - Department of Economics ( email )

855 Sherbrooke St. W
Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T7
Canada

Center for Interuniversity Research and Analysis on Organization (CIRANO) ( email )

2020 rue University, 25th floor
Montreal H3C 3J7, Quebec
Canada

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